CfP: Transnational Germans: Competing Ideas of Germanness since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Call for papers, deadline 24 January 2020

(for German see below / für Deutsch siehe unten)

Transnational Germans: Competing Ideas of Germanness since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Throughout the past two decades, research has emphasised the historical links between globalisation, migration, German imperialism and the construction of a German national identity, both within and outside a German nation-state. This line of research has persuasively demonstrated how the imagination of a German diaspora / German diasporas has been a key element within ideas and representations of Germanness largely informed by imperial-nationalistic or colonial desires. The body of literature mostly focuses on the period between the second half of the nineteenth century and the end of the Second World War (Conrad 2006; Manz 2014; Berger 2015; Schulze 2016).

In parallel, a broad field of scholarship has explored various aspects of the flight and expulsion of Germans at the end of the Second World War, yet often without explicitly foregrounding transnational and global perspectives and hence without critically engaging with the potential implications of such approaches (Frank 2008; Kossert 2008; Beer 2011; Douglas 2012). To a large extent, a similar conceptual and methodological reluctance informs scholarship dealing with ‘Germans’ abroad after the end of the Second World War. Thus, despite the aforementioned de facto transnational turn, the field of vision of German historiography largely seems to contract whenever research focuses on the period after 1945. With some exceptions (Maeder 2011; Panagiotidis 2015; see also Koranyi & Wittlinger 2011; Cercel 2017; Hermanik 2017), literature on ‘Germans abroad’ after the Second World War largely refers to the German-language groups in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe and focuses on their relationships, including migration, with the Federal Republic. It implicitly considers the (latter) German nation-state both as the ‘container’ of ‘Germans’, as well as the ‘container’ of history. In this context, with its focus on German migration to North America after the Second World War, Alexander Freund’s comprehensive and impressive study stands out, making evident the potential richness of the findings that the geographical broadening of the analytical horizon can lead to (Freund 2004; see also Steinert 1995). In a related vein, recent scholarship situating the history of ‘German expellees’ within (comparative) post-imperial and post-colonial research frameworks also suggests transnational avenues for thinking about postwar German history, postwar ‘German’ migrations, and ‘Germans abroad’ in general. (Borutta & Jansen 2016).

The present conference wants to bridge these different, yet fundamentally interrelated fields of scholarship by encouraging dialogue between researchers with different disciplinary credentials who work on disparate periods and who deal with various aspects related to ‘Germanness’ as claim, construct, project, idea and practice. It thus responds to recent pleas which argue that situating German history beyond the German nation-state implicitly or explicitly calls for the integration of German-speaking groups abroad within German historiography. This gives not only an impulse towards a relevant dialogue between different national historiographies, but also provides an opportunity to explicitly subvert some of the nation-state-oriented premises and presuppositions embedded within (more) traditional scholarly approaches. At the same time, the potential traps of such subverting approaches should also be considered (Penny 2012, 2015; Penny & Rinke 2015; Conrad & Osterhammel 2004; Conrad 2006; Manz 2014; Blackbourn 2015).

Hence, our conference takes heed of the de facto transnational turn in German historiography and in German studies, but also aims to question some of its premises and potential consequences. Furthermore, it also distinctly aims to expand the conversation by encouraging an interdisciplinary framework and avoiding the pitfall implied by ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Schiller 2002). We argue nonetheless that particularly the German case calls for a very careful and perhaps even cautious epistemic extension of the field of study, due to the inherent and politically laden tension between transnational approaches and pan-Germanism that is bound to ensue (see also Penny 2017). We are also aware of the fact that research dealing with ‘Germanness’ and ‘Germans abroad’ cannot and should not fully avoid the German nation-state, but rather recalibrate its role and place it in the midst of global interconnections that involve a broad range of other relevant state and non-state actors. The former might include states where recognized German minorities and groups falling under the category ‘Germans abroad’ live, but also other states with their own claims on ‘Germanness’. At different moments in the past and in the present, ‘Germanness‘ has been (and continues to be) an issue of direct concern to states other than (the Federal Republic of) Germany, such as the Habsburg Empire, Austria, the German Democratic Republic, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Israel, Turkey, and others. Some of the states where ‘German’ minorities live tried to integrate them by providing alternative ‘German’ identity constructions, breaking (or not) the connections with the German or Austrian kin-states. Examples of this include the Soviet Union and the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the construction of a ‘Romanian German’ identity in Socialist Romania (Weber 2011) or perhaps even the present-day German-speaking community in Belgium or the autonomous province South Tyrol in Italy. Non-state actors claiming a say in ‘Germanness’ may include religious and humanitarian institutions, professional associations, fraternities etc. Russia, the Americas, and other places ‘overseas’ have been, in their own right, places where ‘Germanness’ has been constructed, contested, or negotiated on several levels. Last but definitely not least, German colonialism has also been associated with identity projects both reinforcing and contesting ‘Germanness’.

Complexity, contradictions, fissures, cracks and rifts inform ‘Germanness’ both as discourse and as practice. Cases such as that of the Sathmar Swabians in North-Western Romania, who were and continue to be claimed as ‘co-ethnics’ by both the Federal Republic of Germany and Hungary, show how complicated the picture can be. In other cases, groups who seem to fall under the category ‘Germans abroad’ (Auslandsdeutsche) can also be rethought for example as ‘Austrians abroad’ (Auslandsösterreicher) or use themselves alternative identifications such as Altösterreicher. To a large extent, ‘German’ presence in the territories and countries east and south of Vienna is linked with former Habsburg rule, yet it is nonetheless Germany rather than Austria which tends to act as a kin-state for such ‘German’ minorities. ‘Germanness’ and idealized projections of German identity can also be coveted, as ‘philo-Germanism’ in Romania suggests (Cercel 2019). At the same time, in different contexts and settings, particular ideas of ‘Germanness’ have been and continue to function as an exclusion mechanism. Some ‘German’ groups have made their own claims to transnational identities that appear to bypass the nation-state, as the existence of institutions such as the Worldwide Federation of Transylvanian Saxons or the Association of Danube Swabians Worldwide indicates. Finally, the religious dimension of ‘German’ identity constructions, often ignored, helps foreground the transnationalism of institutions beyond the nation-state.

In all, we want to explore tensions of identity and terminology that force us to rethink notions and concepts of ‘Germanness’ and ‘German’ identity, perhaps even right down to the question of whether it makes sense to work with such notions and concepts at all? Our conference thus invites contributions that examine and probe ‘Germanness’ ‘beyond’ German statehood, in the period between mid-nineteenth century to the present.Topics may include but are not limited to:- ‘Germanness’ and competing identity constructions;- ‘German expellees’ outside the Federal Republic- ‘Germans’ abroad and German identity- Gendered perspectives on ‘Germanness’;- Religious identity and ‘Germanness’;- ‘Germanness’ between emigration and immigration;- Methods and conceptual frameworks reexamining ‘Germanness’ and ‘Germans’ abroad (histoire croisée, transnationalism as a method etc.);- Intersections, interweavings, interethnicity;- Symbolic geographies;- Borders and boundaries;- ‘Germanness’ versus ‘national indifference’;- ‘Germanness’ in ideological and political contexts;- ‘Germanness’ between ethnicity and class;- Germanness, colonialism and postcolonialism;- Local, national, and transnational actors and networks;- Remembering ‘Germanness’;- ‘German’‘German’ encounters;- Transnationalism and pan-Germanism: inclusion and exclusion;- Plural diasporas;

The conference will take place between 7 and 9 July 2020 and will be hosted by the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. It is part of the project “Vertriebene außerhalb Deutschlands. Die donauschwäbischen Nachkriegsauswanderungen nach La Roque-sur-Pernes (Frankreich) und Entre Rios (Brasilien)”, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Keynote speaker will be H. Glenn Penny (Iowa University).

Accommodation and reasonable travel costs will be covered, but we do ask participants to first look for funding possibilities at their home institutions.

An edited volume with the conference papers will be published in the book series of the Institute for German Culture and History in Southeastern Europe.

Papers can be submitted and presentations can be held in both English and German. We expect participants to have active knowledge of one of the two languages and at least passive knowledge of the other.

Your news here?

Please send information you would like publicized on this site relating to social and labour history to info@socialhistoryportal.org.We welcome information about upcoming conferences, calls for papers, announcements of publications, book reviews, conference reports, news on collections, exhibitions, new websites, etc.

Subscribe to the Social and Labour History News Service

Once a month socialhistoryportal.org sends out a table of contents of messages published in its News Service -- not the entire text, just the clickable titles as they appear on the homepage.
Subscribe here: